Imagine two guys walking onto a stage with completely opposite views on what money should be in the twenty-first century. One just got out of prison after building the biggest crypto empire on the planet. The other has spent decades warning anyone who will listen that paper money is doomed and only gold can save us. When they finally square off, the internet basically explodes. That’s exactly what happened when Changpeng Zhao—CZ to everyone—and Peter Schiff sat down to argue about Bitcoin, gold, and the future of value itself.
An Old War in New Packaging
At its core, the clash isn’t new. Gold bugs and Bitcoin maximalists have been throwing punches since 2009. What made this round different was the timing. Bitcoin is hovering around ninety grand. Spot ETFs are sucking in billions every month. Meanwhile, central banks can’t buy physical gold fast enough, and tokenization platforms are suddenly turning thousand-year-old bullion into something you can send in a text message. The battlefield has changed, but the fundamental question remains the same: what should back our money when trust in governments keeps sliding?
Peter Schiff’s Core Argument: You Can’t Fake Physics
Schiff’s position is brutally simple. Gold has been money for five thousand years because it’s rare, impossible to counterfeit at scale, and—most importantly—exists whether people believe in it or not. Tokenized gold, in his view, just takes the king of metals and gives it twenty-first-century superpowers: instant transfer, perfect divisibility, and the ability to live on your phone without losing the one property that actually matters.
“The token is evidence that you own the gold. It’s like a coat-check ticket. The ticket isn’t the coat, but hand me the ticket and you get the coat—every single time.”
For Schiff, Bitcoin fails the coat-check test. It’s pure confidence, no different from the dollar once Nixon closed the gold window. If tomorrow everyone woke up and decided Bitcoin was worthless, there would be nothing underneath to catch the fall. Gold, on the other hand, would still shine in the vault even if humanity forgot the internet existed.
He’s not entirely wrong about the confidence part—every asset needs some level of collective belief. But calling Bitcoin “backed by nothing” always feels like missing half the picture.
CZ’s Counterpunch: The Network Is the Backing
CZ doesn’t waste time defending Bitcoin as digital gold. Instead, he flips the script entirely. Bitcoin, he says, isn’t trying to be gold 2.0. It’s something new: a global, censorship-resistant settlement layer that nobody can shut down.
Think about it this way. When you own a share of Apple, you don’t own a slice of a factory in Shenzhen. You own a record in a database that says you’re entitled to dividends and voting rights. The value comes from millions of people agreeing that database is trustworthy. Bitcoin is the same idea, except the database is maintained by thousands of strangers who hate each other yet somehow keep perfect books because math forces them to.
“Bitcoin itself doesn’t actually exist. There are only transaction records on a blockchain. That’s it. But those records have value because the network is useful—exactly like Google or the internet itself.”
– Changpeng Zhao during the debate
CZ then drops the example that always quiets a room. He reads a message from an African user who used to walk three days to pay a utility bill. With crypto, it takes three minutes. That man is now saving a few hundred dollars—life-changing money where he lives. Show me the gold bar that can do that without a private jet and a friendly border guard.
The Utility Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s where things get uncomfortable for gold enthusiasts. Physical bullion is fantastic if you’re a central bank with armored trucks and underground vaults. For the other eight billion of us, it’s a nightmare. Try buying coffee with a Krugerrand. Try sending your cousin in another country an ounce of gold when the banks are closed for a three-day weekend. Good luck.
Tokenized gold solves some of those problems—Schiff is right about that. But it still needs custodians, audits, insurance, and trust that the vault won’t mysteriously empty the day the issuer goes bust. Bitcoin needs none of that. Your keys, your coins. No counterparty risk unless you deliberately introduce one.
- Send $10 million across the planet in ten minutes for less than a dollar? Bitcoin does it.
- Settle trades 24/7/365 with finality in an hour? Bitcoin does it.
- Let someone in a country with 5,000% inflation preserve purchasing power? Bitcoin does it every single day.
Gold can store value beautifully. Bitcoin can store and transfer value in places the traditional system forgot. That’s not theory; it’s happening right now in El Salvador, Nigeria, Argentina, and dozens of other countries.
The Speculation Accusation—Both Sides Have a Point
Schiff keeps hammering that 95% of Bitcoin activity is speculation, not real commerce. He’s not entirely wrong. A huge chunk of trading volume is derivatives, leverage, and people trying to get rich quick. But the same was true of internet stocks in 1997. Most of those companies went to zero, yet nobody today argues the internet itself was a bubble.
The underlying technology survived the mania. The same is happening with crypto. Stablecoins now settle hundreds of billions in real volume every year—more than PayPal in many months. Layer-2 networks are bringing fees down to pennies. Lightning lets you buy a beer faster than Venmo. The speculation is loud, but the utility is quietly compounding.
Gold’s Comeback and the BTC/Gold Ratio
One of Schiff’s strongest slides shows the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio. At the 2021 peak, one BTC bought about 37 ounces of gold. Today it buys roughly 22. That’s a 40% decline in purchasing power if you measure it in bullion. Ouch.
The gold crowd cheers. But zoom out. In 2011 one BTC bought about 3 ounces of gold. In 2017 it peaked above 15 ounces before crashing. These ratios swing wildly because both assets are volatile in dollar terms. Gold spent almost fifteen years stuck between $1,000 and $2,000 while Bitcoin went from pennies to ninety thousand dollars. Past performance, cycles, all that jazz.
More importantly, the question isn’t which one goes up more against the dollar next year. The question is which one serves the needs of a digital, borderless economy. Gold is catching up with tokenization—great. But it’s still playing catch-up to a network that’s been borderless and 24/7 for fifteen years.
Why This Debate Actually Matters in 2025
We’re no longer arguing about whether crypto is real. Trillions of dollars in market cap, nation-state adoption, and Wall Street ETFs settled that question. What we’re really arguing about is the shape of the monetary operating system for the next century.
Option A: We rebuild the gold standard on blockchains. Everything is backed by physical atoms in vaults, audited religiously, and custodied by institutions we hope never fail.
Option B: We accept that networks themselves can be the backing. Proof-of-work energy expenditure, game-theoretic security, and fifteen years without a single hack of the base layer become the new “hardness.”
Most people will end up holding some of both. Pension funds already own gold ETFs and Bitcoin ETFs side by side. But the marginal dollar of the next generation—the kids who have never touched cash—is far more likely to flow into digital rails first.
Final Takeaway—They’re Both Half Right
Peter Schiff is correct that intrinsic scarcity matters and that confidence alone eventually cracks. History is littered with fiat currencies that died when faith evaporated.
CZ is correct that utility is the ultimate driver of adoption, and no asset in history has moved value across borders as efficiently as Bitcoin.
The beautiful part? We don’t have to choose forever. Tokenized gold will live on Bitcoin rails and Ethereum rails and Solana rails. Stablecoins already do. The two worlds are merging faster than either side admits.
In ten years we’ll probably look back at this debate and laugh—like watching people argue in 1998 whether email would ever replace fax machines while both sides missed that smartphones were coming.
Gold isn’t going anywhere. Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere. But the winner won’t be the one with the shiniest narrative today. The winner will be whichever system delivers the most freedom to the most people with the least permission required.
My money—literally—is on the network.
